“He was so grieved at the loss of all he’d loved that he wished he could not feel. And as he stood, his heart turned to stone, and stone ran into his blood and crept across his skin and rushed down across his body until he was cold and numb all over. And you can see him there today, in a courtyard in the upper town, frozen in his grief—or so they say.” Lena had never seen the stone boy for herself—but then, the upper town was large and full of courtyards, most of which were private. “The story tells us that magic cannot replace real things. It tricks you. It is a false power.” She thought of the strange feeling she’d had at the crossroads and shivered. All this was frightening her more than she cared to admit. And yet—she couldn’t deny she was drawn to it. Once, she had found a forgotten doorway into a deeper passage of the crypts, stairs twisting down into a darkness so thick it was nearly velvet. She had hovered there, heart racing, unable to move for the fear pulling her backward and the strange longing calling her from below. She felt the same sensation now.

Emris straightened the reins so that they followed the King’s Road far beneath them. “Many stories contain a grain of truth, and that one is no exception. But the whole truth is … well, it’s more complicated. In the City of Kings, every schoolchild learns of Order and Chaos. Order is the physical world, governed by the laws of nature. Things in the physical world are predictable: if you drop something, you know it’s going to hit the floor. Chaos is the opposing force. If you attempt to drop something in a space dominated by chaotic forces, it could very well fly back upward and hit you in the face.”

Lena nodded, watching a farmstead rush by below, surrounded by fields of cows like speckled ants. “So Order is the physical world and Chaos is magic?”

Emris smiled. “Yes, in some ways, though it’s not quite that simple.”

She waited for him to continue.

“Chaos could not exist without the physical world, Lena. It’s best thought of as a kind of energy. If energy exists alone, in a vacuum, it is meaningless. It needs something to affect. Chaos needs Order. And, in turn, Order needs Chaos. Rules are meaningless if nothing has the capacity to burst their boundaries. What is a riverbank without a river, or vice versa? So the world is a delicate balance of Order and Chaos.”

“How does this relate to me?”